My First Time … Watching First Best Picture Oscar Winner ‘Wings’ And Realizing Clara Bow Was A Total Badass

Wings, the first Oscar winner for Best Picture, has been digitally restored and recently made available to stream on Netflix. Now, cinephiles everywhere can check the silent World War I epic from director William A. Wellman off their proverbial bucket list. Wings tells the high-flying tale of two best friends, Jack and David (played by Charles “Buddy” Rodgers and Richard Arlen, respectively), who are in love with the same gal, Sylvia (Jobyna Ralston), who, according to the title cards, “had an advantage over small town girls because she was a visitor from the city.” Mind you, this is what a “city girl” looked like in 1927:

Bushwick much?

When Jack and David aren’t chasing the same chick, they’re getting ready to serve in the United States Air Service (the predecessor to the Air Force) as part of the same troop. Like I said, they’re best friends. So it’s off to war, but not before Jack breaks some filly’s heart.

But Mary Preston (played by Paramount superstar and 1920s sex symbol Clara Bow) isn’t your ordinary and oft-forgotten girl next door. She’s not some background noise you can borrow sugar from and never reciprocate. No, Mary Preston is a bad bitch, trapped in a one-horse town filled with dopey dudes who don’t yet realize her grace and badassery. And though Bow went on record about the role, saying, “Wings is… a man’s picture and I’m just the whipped cream on top of the pie,” the war epic is actually a rom-com about the domino effect of not doing right by the girl next door — curiously handled by a war veteran director and female screenwriter, Sarah Hodge.

Before Jack leaves for war, Mary helps him with a little car tune-up and paints an oversized shooting star on the side of the hood. She hints, “Did you knowing what you can do when you see a shooting star? You can kiss the girl you love.” Though Mary’s pick-up attempts crash harder than the planes being shot out of the sky later on, one thing is for sure: she’s planted a seed. In the Air Service, Jack is coined “the Shooting Star” for his lethal aim against enemy aircraft, a skill that comes back to bite him in the butt at the end of the film (don’t worry, we’ll get there).

Back in Nowheresville, Mary is all like, “I’m outta here,” and enlists as an ambulance driver in the Army, bringing her uniform to uniform with Jack in Paris, where he’s hallucinating from copious amounts of champagne while celebrating a sky-high victory.

Mary knows Jack will get his ass handed to him by his officers if he doesn’t sober up, so she drags him to his quarters where he can sleep off his hangover. Once upstairs, Mary puts Jack to bed and cries a little (probably because she’s realized what a waste of time this was, getting all dolled up for this loser) before changing back into her uniform. But not before Jack’s officers barge in and see her boobs.

Boobies in 1927. You go, Clara Bow.

The story gets a little #problematic from here on out when Jack’s officers send her back to the U.S. for perversion and indecency (after they’re done ogling her, of course). After Jack returns home from the war to visit the mother of his best bud David, who he accidentally shot down (GAH! You weren’t ready for it, were you?), he stops by to see Mary and realizes he’s totally head-over-heels and that she’s his shooting star and happily ever after and kiss, kiss, kiss.

Despite its eventual circling back into audience-friendly narrative tropes, the film is incredibly mesmerizing in the sense thatyou have to keep reminding yourself it was made 88 years ago. The flying sequences alone deserved the Academy Award for their innovation, in which Wellman’s camera switches from birds-eye to ants-eye to the point of view of the plane’s yoke to first-person POV and back again — a feat we see recreated in Howard Hughes’ Hells Angels. In addition to the ground-breaking filmmaking, Clara Bow’s star power lifts the war tale from a mega-budget ($2 million was major moolah back then) unofficial bromance to something much more profound.

Hot off the release of It, which coined the phrase “It Girl,” Clara Bow was the biggest star in Hollywood and Paramount’s greatest asset by the time Wings was released six months later. Bow was an unstoppable force in the mid-1920s that came out of left field and gave the country a reason to indulge in celebrity worship (à la Jennifer Lawrence circa 2012). A silent film actress who was famous for her Brooklyn snark in magazine interviews, Bow was quickly adored by men, women, and teens who couldn’t get enough of the It Girl with the permanent pout, dark eyes, and fierce talent that eventually helped her transition to talkies. Certainly Wings could have won the award for Best Picture without Bow’s storyline or starring another actress altogether, but it’s her charismatic presence, one that propelled a milktoast gal into a top-billing dame, makes Wellman’s film timeless nearly nine decades later.

 

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Photos: Netflix/Everett Collection